The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is psychiatry’s billing bible of so-called mental disorders.
With the DSM, psychiatry has taken countless aspects of human behavior and reclassified them as a mental illness simply by adding the term disorder onto them. While even key DSM contributors admit that there is no scientific/medical validity to the disorders, the DSM nonetheless serves as a diagnostic tool, not only for individual treatment, but also for child custody disputes, discrimination cases, court testimony, education and more. As the diagnoses completely lack scientific criteria, anyone can be labeled mentally ill, and subjected to dangerous and life threatening treatments based solely on opinion. The treatment of virtually ANY of the “illnesses” listed and so diagnosed is virtually ALWAYS one or more drugs.
There is NO science behind the “illnesses” listed, no test results, no verifiable or duplicable experimental data and NO evidence that such illnesses actually exist. They are voted into the manual by a show of hands at psychiatric conference. That is how much “science” is involved. Take Road Rage as a recent example. People sometimes get mad while driving. Decide to call it a mental illness, get it voted into the DSM by a show of hands and Road Rage is now a mental illness.
“The nonscientific approach used to create DSM leads to irrational and constantly changing diagnostic criteria: a patient might be perfectly normal according to one version of DSM and mentally ill by the standards of the next. (For instance, ‘narcissistic personality disorder’—used to describe vain people who are self-centered and frequently take advantage of others—was a DSM ‘diagnosis’ until 1968. It was eliminated from the version used between 1968 and 1980, when it was reinstated. Thus, a self-centered, vain person was ‘mentally ill’ before 1968, normal for the next twelve years, and then ‘mentally ill’ again after 1980.)” – Dr. Sydney Walker, III, psychiatrist, neurologist
